Hello, I hope you are having a good day. today after a week and a half I am finally releasing Stillworks Pre Alpha 0.0.4. with it comes a major new feature along with some serious under the hood enhancements.

The Inventory

In order for the game to even be able to go anywhere or have any real gameplay first off, it's going to need an inventory system. I set aside a couple of days to try to get an inventory system in, but it ended up taking a lot longer than I originally thought it would. There were lots of issues and I had to go through and revamp the code several times before I got everything working properly. in the end, I now have a basic inventory system that you can add items to and move items around in, it's very basic but I plan on expanding on it in future updates. Block placing is still missing because I didn't have time to add it back in this update without pushing it back another couple of days.

Improved GUI Scaling

One of the things that I really want is the ability for anybody to be able to play Stillworks, regardless of computer specs, operating system, or monitor resolution; And the last one requires that the GUI scales properly across different screen sizes when resizing, this would have been easy in a pre-made game engine like unity, however, I programmed Stillworks in a custom engine so I had to get creative. I ended up creating a system that checks the window resolution and compares it to the default resolution and then changes the scale of the GUI elements based on that value. the result is a pretty good scaling system that does a good job keeping all the elements on-screen at all times.

Engine Optimizations

As I mentioned above, Stillworks is written in a custom engine, it does a pretty good job at the things it's written to do. however, there is always room for improvement; especially when a lot of the code in Stillworks was just thrown together quickly. While working on the inventory I also spent a lot of time cleaning the engine code and improving the handling of things such as Input and Rendering. this not only should improve performance, but also make the code easier to read.

New Items

Along with the inventory, I have also added some new items: Planks, Wood Logs, Stone Bits, Sword, Pickaxe, and Just for Halloween I have added Halloween Candy. you can give yourself these items by using the number keys and you can give yourself the Halloween Candy by pressing control + shift + 0. I will continue to add new items in the coming updates. and make it so you can actually get items by gathering or picking them up off the ground rather than spawning them in from the void.

That's all for now; however, I would like to add that I will be away for a few days without a computer so there may not be any updates or dev blogs for a few days :)